That piece of Aviation history that would not go silently.

There is always something tragic about heroes dying. Yet nothing more heroic than sustaining a legacy.

The SAS owned Arild Viking seemed to have marked aviation history when on its historic voyage that opened the Polar Aviation route, flying first from Copenhagen to Los Angeles. Only the sequential change of ownership were premonitory of it’s future landing to oblivion.

It’s not everyday that a territory or a city get’s graced with a piece of history, and Cyprus is all too knowledgeable, being itself gifted, with the wealth of vestiges from antiquity. Yet what happens with intangible culture and transmissible heritage is another story.

Not all is lost with humanity wanting to sustain legacy of it’s past achievements; one can look to the efforts for saving the Telsa Laboratory in New York, an effort by a non-profit to buy back the land and the decrepit building so as to turn the renowned building into a museum.

Of course, it’s not about just a bunch of bricks or about pieces of metal, it’s about our generations capacity of understanding historic significance of certain accomplishments and the existing bonds in the community which certain artifacts sustain.

Read the story of the Telsa soon to be museum and how else can you explain the movement behind raising $1.6 million just to buy the land from a multinational company that has been sitting on it for years, even contaminating it. Today we can safely say that an essence of Nikola Telsa has been revived and his most noble pursuit, that of “free wireless energy to the world” may be closer today of being understood.

I don’t know about you, but as I look at the excitement generated by the Arild Viking flight some 60 years ago, I too had failed to understand it’s meaning until today. Mind you this is not just a critic towards Cyprus cultural policies, but one that raises the point about those legacies which gov’ts and corporations decide to ignore, leaving it to history and fate to decide, unless in exceptional cases, the Galetti’s of this world come to the rescue.

Has the Arild Viking said it’s last word? Who does have the last word is now in the community’s hands.